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ventaYesterday I had one of those moments where I realise I have a very specific opinion on something - but no real justification for it, and no clear idea where I got it from.
So, you, my dear self-selecting sample of guinea pigs, have the opportunity to prove me right. Or wrong. But I'm not going to tell you which is which. I'd hate to bias my otherwise-scientific survey.
I'm asking here about portable mp3 players (or mp3-a-likes). If you use your computer to play mp3s at you at home, or have some form of mp3 monster in the car, that's not what I meant.
[Poll #442057]
So, you, my dear self-selecting sample of guinea pigs, have the opportunity to prove me right. Or wrong. But I'm not going to tell you which is which. I'd hate to bias my otherwise-scientific survey.
I'm asking here about portable mp3 players (or mp3-a-likes). If you use your computer to play mp3s at you at home, or have some form of mp3 monster in the car, that's not what I meant.
[Poll #442057]
no subject
Date: 2005-02-22 11:36 am (UTC)To go back to your example with the diamond merchant, the attitude of many people seems to be "well, I have to wear these handcuffs, but I have boltcutters so it's OK", which ignores the encroaching legislation to make boltcutters themselves illegal.
I really can't see a situation where a DRM solution is (a) better than a non-DRM solution and (b) not outweighed by the downsides and abuses of DRM.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-22 01:02 pm (UTC)Because of what DRM is - namely a rights description language coupled with semantics for media software to enforce the restrictions expressed using the language, and some kind of encryption to obfuscate the content so that non-compliant software has to work its ass off to get a look-in. I'm fairly confident that's the industry-standard definition.
Displaying the license of a piece of software as a click-through thing was standard practice before DRM
However, it wasn't standard practice for movie or audio clips, and the license was not encoded using a semantic markup which user agents could understand and implement - it is solely up to the user to work out for himself whether or not he is abiding by the terms of the license, which is ridiculous when you consider that most such licenses are (a) very wordy and (b) almost identical.
It is a principle of DRM because the licensing restrictions are precisely the information conveyed by the rights language. Whether a particular agent actually displays them is of course a slightly different matter.
Having terms and conditions on mp3 download sites still happens
Those TaC statements aren't associated with the content, they're associated with the site. This means that they don't travel with the content, an issue which has become a serious drawback in the last few years now that file sharing is a significant reality. DRM typically associates the rights (or means of acquiring them) with the content in some kind of container.
There are various ways of providing metadata with content (such as a URL field in an mp3 or Ogg Vorbis file)
That doesn't provide a very rich rights-description markup, and there are 0 media players which will check the specified URL and, if it indicates that the content may not be played without permission, ask the user whether they wish to buy that permission. There is of course the "copyright" bit in mp3, which again is not a terribly rich language, which is generally ignored, and which if it wasn't trivially ignorable would in fact be DRM (of a very rudimentary kind).
There are projects like Creative Commons to encourage common types of fair use without DRM.
Creative Commons really isn't very useful for people who want to make money by selling content, because the most restrictive license it offers still allows licensees to redistribute the entire thing with no royalty payments. If you believe that people should not be permitted to make money by charging royalties for the use of IP, then that's a perfectly respectable belief to hold, but to assert that a solution based on that belief can solve current IP issues is very optimistic indeed.
Ultimately, CC is not about "fair use" in the current legal definition of the term, it defines a new set of things and asserts axiomatically that these are the things which CC will consider to be fair. It then does so.
DRM does a similar thing, where the content provider defines what is fair use, and permits that through granted rights. The allowed rights are typically more restrictive than the current legal definition of "fair use", which is why current use of DRM is more evil than CC, but that is not an essential property of a rights-restricted object. The principle is that the content provider gets to say what they are prepared to allow, and the user must abide by that in order to stay within the system. As you point out, this principle is also present in CC, so it is not unique to DRM, but it certainly is one of the primary motivations of DRM. What would be nice would be a rights language in which well-known kinds of fair use were easily expressed and protected. This is a function of who it is that gets to defined the language, provider or consumer.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-22 01:02 pm (UTC)I really can't see a situation where a DRM solution is (a) better than a non-DRM solution and (b) not outweighed by the downsides and abuses of DRM.
A hypothetical situation, or one likely to happen in the next few years? If you mean the latter, then I reiterate my original comment that current DRM standards and implementations suck. They're currently just a blunt tool for enforcement of copyright restrictions, not a means to inform users of their rights and responsibilities as defined in law.
If the former, then consider a rights description language which is open, unencumbered by patent, and which copyright owners can attach to a piece of content in order to unambiguously inform content users what they can and can't do. So far, we have Creative Commons licensing, which you seem to support. Now extend the language to describe a more complete set of everyday copyright situations, ("you may play this game free either three times for for two hours, whichever happens first, then here's the URL at which to cough up your dough to keep playing"), rather than only those consistent with a particular ideology, and implement it in software so that your user agent pops up a dialog saying "you are about to commit a copyright infringement. Continue? [Make it legal] [Abort] [Continue] [Always break the law for this content]". Of course the latter two options will be greyed out if you're fool enough to use hardware owned by The Man, or if you compiled with LAW_ABIDING_CITIZEN=true, but that's your lookout.
What's your objection?
no subject
Date: 2005-02-24 11:57 pm (UTC)is compatible with
As long as people feel the need to enforce DRM through encryption, they're not going to make it easier for people to circumvent that encryption. I have absolutely no problem with a standardised form of informing users about copyright, so long as they're free to ignore that without the horrendous hacks that it would take to enforce it, like the NGSCB "copyright chip".
Also, the problem with enforceable DRM is that it contradicts fair use legislation. DVD ripping software manufactured in the US might try to stop a Norwegian user ripping a region 2 DVD there, even though it's legal to do so (but illegal IIRC in England, which is the same DVD region).
I'm not opposed to standardised electronic ways of conveying copyright information to the user, I'm just opposed to things which introduce massive complication, insecurity (such as Windows Media Player's DRM code being used to introduce viruses to your computer) and violation of fair use, which will do nothing to stop piracy and everything to harm legitimate users.